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markfriedlander
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wsl-analyzer

Tasks:
Tabular Regression
Tabular Classification
Time Series Forecasting
Languages:
English
Size:
100K<n<1M
Tags:
sports
surfing
wsl
world-surf-league
competition
fantasy
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metadata 
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
  - en
pretty_name: WSL Championship Tour Heat-Level Dataset (2014–2025)
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
task_categories:
  - tabular-regression
  - tabular-classification
  - time-series-forecasting
  - other
tags:
  - sports
  - surfing
  - wsl
  - world-surf-league
  - competition
  - fantasy
  - wave-pool
  - ocean
  - era5
  - weather
  - analytics
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: full
        path: wsl-v4.sqlite
extra_gated_prompt: >-
  This dataset is released for non-commercial research and analytical use under
  CC BY 4.0. Surf scoring data is scraped from public WSL results pages and is
  not an official WSL product. ERA5 weather data is from Open-Meteo under CC BY
  4.0.

WSL Championship Tour Heat-Level Dataset (2014–2025)

A complete, structured, hash-chained dataset of every World Surf League Men's and Women's Championship Tour heat from 2014 through 2025 — 230 events, 7,494 heats, 17,710 surfer-heat rows, 103,489 individual waves — joined to break geometry and ERA5 oceanic/atmospheric reanalysis.

Built for fantasy-league optimization, surf analytics, and educational machine-learning work. Every row is identified by a deterministic SHA-256 hash chain, every value is sourced from the public WSL website with documented provenance, and every known source-data limitation is recorded explicitly rather than papered over.

Quick start 

import sqlite3
import pandas as pd

conn = sqlite3.connect("wsl-v4.sqlite")

# All heats from a recent event with conditions
heats = pd.read_sql("""
    SELECT e.name, h.heat_date, h.wave_range, h.wind_condition,
           era5.wave_height_m, era5.wind_speed_kmh
    FROM Event e
    JOIN Heat h ON h.event_id = e.event_id
    LEFT JOIN ERA5Conditions era5
      ON era5.break_id = h.break_id
     AND DATE(era5.observation_hour) = h.heat_date
     AND CAST(substr(era5.observation_hour, 12, 2) AS INTEGER) = 12  -- noon
    WHERE e.year = 2025 AND e.tour = 'MCT'
""", conn)

For a working schema dump, run sqlite3 wsl-v4.sqlite '.schema' after download.

Dataset summary

  • Coverage: 2014–2025, both Men's CT (MCT) and Women's CT (WCT), all events including wave-pool stops (Surf Ranch, Freshwater Pro, Surf Abu Dhabi, Jeep Surf Ranch).
  • Granularity: Wave-level. Every wave a surfer caught in every heat is a row, with score, counted/uncounted flag, interference flag, and direction (for wave-pool events).
  • Format: Single SQLite file (~18 MB, 9 tables, 7 indexes). The compact size is deliberate — see "ERA5 design choice" below.
  • Identity: Every primary key is a deterministic SHA-256 hash truncated to 16 hex characters. The hash chain encodes ancestry: wave_id = SHA256(heat_id|athlete_id|wave_index), heat_id = SHA256(round_id|heat_number), etc. Two independent observers computing IDs from the same source HTML produce the same IDs — the dataset is reproducible by construction.
  • Conditions: ERA5 reanalysis from Open-Meteo (Marine + Archive APIs) joined by (break_id, observation_hour). 98.5% of heats join to a full 24-hour ERA5 day at their break.
  • Audit: Verdict HEALTHY, 0 Critical, 0 Major findings. 365 / 365 stratified-sample heats verified clean against the live WSL site at publication time.

Tables

Table Rows Purpose
Event 230 One row per (year, tour, name, location, anomaly_class). MCT and WCT are always separate rows.
Round 1,496 Three columns: round_id, event_id, round_number. No display name (app-layer concern).
Heat 7,494 The principal competitive unit. Date, duration, conditions, break, wsl_heat_id for source traceability.
HeatSurfer 17,710 (heat × surfer) pairing with total_score and outcome_type.
Wave 103,489 One row per wave. Score, is_counted (top-2-counted indicator), is_zeroed_by_interference, direction (wave-pool only).
Surfer 474 Surfer profile: nationality, stance, DOB, height/weight (where WSL publishes them).
Break 40 Geographic + competitive metadata — lat/lon, break type/handedness, swell window, orientation.
BreakAlias 196 Year-aware mapping of WSL-rendered location strings → canonical break_id.
ERA5Conditions 15,264 Hourly ERA5 reanalysis: wave height/period/direction, wind speed/direction, surface pressure.

Hash chain (governing identity rule) 

event_id     = SHA256(name | year | tour | location | x)[:16]
round_id     = SHA256(event_id | round_number)[:16]
heat_id      = SHA256(round_id | heat_number)[:16]
heatentry_id = SHA256(heat_id | athlete_id)[:16]
wave_id      = SHA256(heat_id | athlete_id | wave_index)[:16]
break_id     = SHA256(name | lat:.6f | lon:.6f)[:16]
condition_id = SHA256(break_id | observation_hour)[:16]
athlete_id   = SHA256(name | date_of_birth | nationality)[:16]

x = 1 for multi-break events (heats span breaks with different competitive character — e.g. 2018 Margaret River split across North Point, Margaret River, Uluwatu after a shark incident; 2020 Maui Pro split between Honolua Bay and Pipeline). Heat-level break_id is authoritative for which specific break each heat ran at.

NULL sentinel: any field that is NULL in the source uses the literal string "NULL" in hash inputs. Exception: heat_number falls back to 1-based positional ordering within its round when the source HTML doesn't provide a number, to avoid hash collisions.

Coverage by year and tour

Year MCT events WCT events Notes
2014–2019 11 10 Standard tour
2020 1 1 COVID-disrupted year. Only the December 2020 Pipe Masters and Maui Pro made it.
2021 7 7 Truncated COVID-recovery season
2022–2024 10–11 10–11 Standard tour
2025 12 12 Current full season (latest)

Pre-2014 data is not included in this release. Earlier development generations of this dataset once contained partial MCT 2008–2013 and WCT 2010–2013 data scraped from WSL's archive, but per-wave detail is incomplete for that era and those generations were superseded before v4. The current production database and the available pre-v4 backup both cover 2014 onward only. v4 is therefore not a 2008-onward archive with the early years stripped — it is a uniform 2014–2025 dataset by design, where every event has full wave-level fidelity.

Data sources and provenance

Competition data is scraped from public WSL results pages (worldsurfleague.com/events/...) using the heat-popup endpoint and round-listing pages. Every heat record is traceable back to a specific WSL URL via Heat.wsl_heat_id. Recent re-crawls (April 2026) used direct popup-by-popup parsing with grid-attribution validation; earlier crawl batches were verified end-to-end against the same source.

ERA5 conditions come from Open-Meteo's Marine API (models=era5_ocean) and Archive API (models=era5). Hourly resolution, 0.25–0.5° spatial. Stored as raw values — no aggregation at the storage layer.

ERA5 design choice — why the dataset is ~18 MB. A naïve enrichment fetches ERA5 for every hour of every day across each break's full historical span. For 28 ocean breaks over a 12-year window that's ~2.9 million hourly rows, the vast majority of which would never join to a heat (heats happen on a handful of discrete days per year, not continuously). The v3 predecessor of this dataset stored ~129 MB primarily for that reason. v4 instead fetches ERA5 only for the actual heat days each break sees — one 24-hour ERA5 day per unique (break_id, heat_date) pair — producing 15,336 rows with 100% ocean-heat join coverage. Same usability, ~7× smaller file. Wave-pool venues (Surf Ranch, Surf Abu Dhabi) carry zero ERA5 rows by policy: pool conditions are mechanically generated and are not derivable from offshore reanalysis, so populating them would create joinable but physically meaningless values.

Surfer profile data (nationality, stance, DOB, height/weight) is scraped from individual athlete profile pages. Nationality follows WSL's competitive designation rather than legal citizenship (e.g. Hawaiian surfers are listed as "Hawaii", not "United States" — WSL treats Hawaii as a separate competitive territory).

No carry-forward. Every row of competition data was fetched fresh from WSL's current servers in 2026, parsed by an audited parser, and validated against per-heat consistency rules (e.g. total_score == sum(top-2 counted scores) for every surfer). Six events that were originally carried forward from a prior release were purged and re-crawled in this release.

Verification status

  • Audit verdict: HEALTHY (0 Critical, 0 Major, 14 Minor, 36 Info findings).
  • Stratified sample verifier: 365 / 365 heats verified clean. Sample stratifies by year (≥15 ocean heats per year) and per wave-pool event (≥3 heats per event, or all heats for events with fewer than 3 by structure).
  • Per-heat consistency: Every HeatSurfer.total_score reconciles with SUM of the top-2 counted Wave scores within the same (heat, athlete) within ±0.011 tolerance, except where WSL applied an interference penalty.
  • Hash-chain integrity: Every Wave traces to a HeatSurfer traces to a Heat traces to a Round traces to an Event; no orphan rows.

Known limitations (documented)

  1. Heat times not stored. Granularity is day-only (heat_date). WSL does not publish per-heat start times for historical heats. ERA5 joins use day-level matching and let the consumer decide which hour(s) to interpolate.

  2. Penalty 1 (interference halving) not detectable. WSL applies interference at three tiers: (1) second-best wave halved, (2) second-best wave zeroed, (3) best wave zeroed. Tiers 2 and 3 are captured via Wave.is_zeroed_by_interference = 1 (cell carries wave--adjusted class AND score = 0.0). Tier 1 is a score reduction with no machine-readable HTML signal — the pre-halving score is never published. The post-halving score (which we store) is correct as a score; only the "this was halved" annotation is missing. No re-crawl will fix this — it's a source-data limitation.

  3. TBD waves. WSL renders some wave-grid cells as the literal text "TBD" — slots that exist on the wave grid but never received a numeric score (likely WSL data-entry gaps). v4 stores TBD waves as Wave rows with score = NULL, is_counted = 0. The wave_count column matches WSL's display; aggregations should filter WHERE score IS NOT NULL to exclude. There are 12 TBD waves total.

  4. Heat.wsl_heat_id = -1 sentinel. 14 pre-2023 wave-pool heats (Surf Ranch 2018, Freshwater 2019, Jeep Surf Ranch 2021) carry the sentinel value -1 because WSL's leaderboard rendering for those years does not expose individual heat IDs. The verifier uses a leaderboard-format branch for these. No data is missing — only the WSL-side ID.

  5. Source omissions in wave_range / wind_condition. WSL did not consistently publish wave range or wind condition for 2014–2017 events, and a few 2023 events have event-wide gaps (Pipe Pro, Portugal, Bells Beach). NULL means absent at source. ERA5 covers these gaps numerically.

  6. ERA5 break coverage = 28 of 40 breaks. 98.5% of heats join. The 112 unjoined heats are at 12 breaks not yet pulled into ERA5Conditions — Surf Ranch, Surf Abu Dhabi, plus 10 lower-volume venues. Open-Meteo data is available for these; pulling it is straightforward future work.

  7. Surfer height / weight ~40% populated. WSL profile pages omit these fields for many historical surfers. NULL = not published, not zero.

Suggested uses

Fantasy surf league optimization. The dataset was originally built for this. Per-event point totals, per-surfer break-history aggregates, and ERA5 conditions are all queryable in SQL. See [GitHub repo / paper / blog post — TBD] for prior modeling experiments.

Educational ML. A worked example of a domain-expert-driven ML project from data collection through audit. The v4 build itself is a story — the project includes documented bug discoveries, parser corrections, and audit-driven verification. Useful for teaching how to build trustworthy data pipelines from scraped web sources.

Sports analytics research. Wave-by-wave granularity over 12 years, multi-tour, multi-venue, with weather covariates. Suitable for studying career trajectories, condition-performance interactions, head-to-head matchup outcomes, etc.

What this dataset is NOT. It is not an official WSL product. It is not real-time. It does not include video, replays, or judge-by-judge score breakdown (WSL does not publish per-judge scores in popup HTML for completed heats). It does not include interference Penalty-1 halving annotations (see Limitations).

Schema details

Run .schema in sqlite3 against wsl-v4.sqlite for the canonical schema. Highlights:

Wave columns:

  • wave_id (PK), heat_id, athlete_id, wave_index (1-based per surfer-heat)
  • score (REAL) — WSL's displayed score, post-penalty if applicable. NULL for TBD waves.
  • is_counted (INTEGER 0/1) — 1 if this wave is one of the surfer's top-2 (counts toward heat total).
  • is_zeroed_by_interference (INTEGER 0/1) — 1 only for Penalty 2/3 strict zeroing (see Limitations).
  • direction (TEXT) — "right" or "left" for wave-pool waves; NULL for ocean.

Heat columns:

  • heat_id (PK), round_id, event_id, heat_number
  • heat_date (TEXT YYYY-MM-DD), heat_duration (TEXT ISO-8601, e.g. PT30M)
  • wave_range, wind_condition (TEXT — WSL's rendered strings, may be NULL for archive gaps)
  • break_id (TEXT) — joins to Break and ERA5Conditions
  • wsl_heat_id (INTEGER) — sentinel-aware: > 0 = popup-format with WSL-assigned ID; -1 = leaderboard-format pre-2023 wave-pool; never NULL
  • data_quality_notes (TEXT) — non-NULL for ~35 heats with documented anomalies

Event columns:

  • event_id (PK), name, year, tour ("MCT" or "WCT"), location
  • break_id (TEXT) — default break for the event; heat-level break_id is authoritative for split events
  • contest_start_date, contest_end_date, is_split_event (INTEGER 0/1)
  • note (TEXT) — descriptive notes for calendar-straddling, COVID-disrupted, multi-break sourcing, etc.

Citation

If you use this dataset in research, please cite:

@dataset{wsl_v4_2026,
  author       = {Friedlander, Mark},
  title        = {WSL Championship Tour Heat-Level Dataset (2014--2025), v4},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/<TBD>}
}

License

This dataset is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Required attributions:

  • WSL data: Scraped from public results pages on worldsurfleague.com. Not an official WSL product.
  • ERA5 weather data: "Weather data by Open-Meteo.com" (CC BY 4.0).

Changelog

  • v4 (2026-04-30, this release): Fresh recrawl of all competition data from WSL. Hash chain locked. ERA5 join coverage 98.5%. 365/365 stratified-sample heats verified clean. Audit verdict HEALTHY.